Bill White’s Big Dropout Problem

It has come to our attention, and perhaps to yours, too, that Bill White is under the misimpression that Texas’s “dropout problem,” as he undoubtedly has phrased it somewhere along the line, is the hobby horse he’ll be able to flay straight into the under-repair Governor’s Mansion. It also appears that White is blaming Rick Perry for the problem, or at the very least suggesting that Perry hasn’t done anywhere near enough to keep those hard-working, knowledge-starved kids in school. (We must shrug and stipulate into the record here that, as best we can recall, we have never voted for Perry for any office, and we’re unlikely to do so this year, although, as with all things in heaven and on earth, we’re open to the possibility, in the unlikely event that Perry says or does something that impresses us.) The issue flared last week when, according to this story in the local newspaper, White and Perry argued over the extent of the, um, problem, with White proclaiming that “nearly 1 million Texas students have failed to graduate or get a GED on time” during the nine years Perry has been governor and Perry riposting that “the [number] that Mr. White uses is taking the number of kids starting their freshmen year and then the ones that graduate in four years the following May or June. If a child dies, they count that as a dropout. I think that's a little harsh.”

Now this particular debate over numbers strikes as being almost as meaningless as the semantic one over whether Houston is a “sanctuary” city ('tis what it is, y’know), although we have to give Perry comedy points for his baldly risible assertion that child mortality is is a factor in whatever the actual dropout numbers are. On the larger issue that White has been raising, however, we must rise again, all by our lonesome it seems, to point out what no other member of the Mainstream News and Infotainment Media has the wit, or the stick, to point out, and that is this: Bill White doesn’t have any more of a clue than Rick Perry about how to fix the “dropout problem” (we’re using quotes here because we are not fully convinced that the self-selecting clearing-out of the schools by teenagers who don’t want to be there is an entirely bad thing, but that’s pretty much beside the point we’re driving at, so let us keep our eyes on the road and our hands upon the wheel).

So far White has a little better than nothing, zilch, but clownish and ill-advised catchphrases and gusts of hot air, such as, “The governor is more interested in his own future than the future of Texans.” Yeah, that’s probably 'cause Rick Perry hates kids and wants them to be failures. You can see it in his eyes. And we all remember his wildly successful “Drop Out of School Right Now, Ninos” campaign. The Chronicle story kinda-sorta pointed out White’s nearly empty basket:

White, the son of public school educators, conceded there is no single or easy answer to the problem.

“You need to start early with early childhood education,” he said. “You need to offset summer learning loss (programs) for those elementary school kids who do not have access to books and computers at home during the summer. You need to have more flexible programs that accommodate and support those students in their attempt to graduate who must work when they are in high school.”

Oh, it’s not like anybody ever thought of that before, or tried it. Scouring White’s campaign Web site last week, we saw the first item under the heading “reducing the dropout rate” was this classic example of Bill White’s full-court noblesse:

When a student drops out of school, it must be treated as an emergency, not just another statistic. In Houston we launched Expectation Graduation to cut the dropout rate. For example, each fall, my wife Andrea and I led thousands of volunteers to go to the homes of high school students who have not returned to school. Approximately 8,800 students have returned to school as a result, and this initiative has been replicated in communities across Texas.

Yes, that’ll do it: A statewide version of the PR stunt that HISD and now other school districts pull every summer whereby teachers, administrators and concerned-citizen types go to the houses of dropouts to try and talk them back into school. (We are skeptical in the extreme of this 8,000 number and would suggest that some bored journalist –– a journalist, not a publicist –– track, say, 20 of these kids who answer the door when Bill White and Co. come a’knockin’ this summer to see how many of them actually make it back to school, and how many eventually graduate. Ah, but that would be real work and take lots of time and in any case would probably be a downer, so never mind.) There’s was one decent and very modest idea that White appears to have made, which we can't do justice to at this moment because the "issues" link on his site isn't loading, but it had something to do forging closer links between schools and businesses that employ students in after-school jobs.

If White were serious about the dropout problem and not just trying to warp reality by blaming Perry, he'd buck up and demonstrate some of the intestinal fortitude his successor as mayor seems to possess by doing the following:

1. Call for the immediate end of "bilingual" classes in Texas public schools in favor of strict and unrelenting English immersion for all students. This is one of our frequent hobby horses, so we’ll just direct your attention to this Heather McDonald article exploring how, as the author put is, the “curtailment of California’s bilingual-education industry” and its “counterintuitive linguistic claims” have led to slightly higher test scores for Hispanic students in that state. The “dropout problem" is not, of course, exclusively a Hispanic problem, but in large urban school districts it is a disproportionately Hispanic one, and anyone who thinks the early-grades barrio-izing of non-English-speaking Spanish speakers doesn’t contribute, directly, to the “dropout problem” down the road is a fool. White won't do this, of course, because he's already demonstrated a pronounced disinclination to break with Democratic Party orthodoxy, and the fear of course is that such a stand would alienate Hispanic voters, although we'd expect the blowback would be a lot less than you'd imagine among Mexican-Americans who actually vote (and speak English). But White needs to do this, not just because it's the right thing (always reason enough), but because he requires his own "Sister Souljah" moment ––and this, unlike Clinton's, would be a moment on something that actually matters–– if he wants to avoid having “Lost to Rick '39 Percent' Perry in First Bid for Statewide Office” as his next resume entry. This is a no-brainer when it comes to sound public policy. Maybe that's why we can't recall Rick Perry ever having anything to say on the subject, either.

2. Call for an immediate end to the requirement that students must complete four years of math, four years of science, four years of English, etc., to graduate high school. This, too, would skirt the boundaries of bipartisan heresy –– that no man's land where Bill White has rarely ventured –– because it would implicitly acknowledge the cold fact, verifiable by 4,000 years of human experience, that not all kids are cut out to master Algebra II. What you could do instead is retain the 4-year requirements for a college-bound track of study but offer an alternative for kids who’d rather learn some vocational skills and who probably aren't going to get a whole out of reading, say, Love in the Time of Cholera. Beginning with or just after 9th grade, the bewitching hour for most dropouts, the non-college track would consist of three hours in the morning of intense instruction and/or remediation in math and language arts, with three more hours after lunch devoted to the teaching of skills (plural) that will come in handy in the workplace. The choice of tracks would up to the student and his parents. This, too is no-brainer, but come to think of it we can't recall Rick Perry saying much on the subject (maybe he has and we missed it).

3. Start addressing the nettlesome and unpleasant cultural factors that are the main contributor to the “dropout problem.” Take to the bully pulpit and emphasize that it’s not a good idea for 12-year-old “shorties” to be having more shorties. Suggest to parents that it’s an equally bad idea to pull their kids out of school for a month in the middle of the semester to go back to Mexico. Explain why it’s not a sound parenting practice for mamas to drop their kindergartners off at school in the morning with the godawful rap music with its “motherfucker this” and “motherfucker that” blaring out of the windows. In other words, start putting the onus where it belongs: on the parents. Because no halfway sensible person is going to look at the "dropout problem" and think Rick Perry's the daddy.

Rick Perry: Unheralded Savant of Texas Politics ...

Or Lucky Doofus Who Fell Off the Back of a Pick-Up and Landed on a Mattress Lying in the Middle of the Freeway?

Time will tell. It has occurred to us, though, that Perry might be an age-defying phenomenon similar to the Rumble-in-the-Jungle era Ali, employing his version of the rope-a-dope to lay back on the ropes and suck up the gut punches and bide his time until his adversary is exhausted and then step right to it--BAM! Yeah, they saw that 39 percent and thought he was done, spent, washed-up, a goner, but....

On the other hand, we are reminded that Perry first obtained his office by constitutional succession and has held it since by first dispatching the colorless, odorless Tony Sanchez and then the tag-team duo of Chris Bell and Grandma Whazzhername, and that Bill White, if we may extend the boxing metaphor into hazily obscure territory, is no Jürgen Blin.

Like Perry, White did what he needed to do on Tuesday. What he needs to do from here on out is pay close attention to the deeply encoded instructions we will be issuing in this space (the anagram spells “V-I-C-T-O-R-Y”). Our first bit of advice, which as usual we are providing free of charge as a selfless act of civic-mindedness, is to STAY AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE from all other Democratic nominees for statewide office, and never, ever, speak of the “Democratic ticket.” If you should accidently run into one of these people at, say, the airport terminal in Junction,* ACT LIKE YOU DON’T KNOW THEM, in case a weekly newspaper reporter or Republican operative obtains photographic evidence of you in flagrante (in the legal sense) with, say, Barbara Ann Radnofsky. In fact, and we know this will probably be impossible to do, instruct your scheduler to make sure that you’re never any closer than 50 miles to any other Democratic statewide officer-seeker.

Also: Go negative right away. Ali’s off the ropes.

*Did we ever tell ya about the time we were flying ‘round the Lone Star State at nighttime with some humble office-seeker or another and they were trying to land the plane in Junction, but the pilot couldn’t spot the airport and finally he had to raise the sheriff’s department on the horn to get somebody over to the facility to turn on the runway lights? The candidate was going to lose anyway and if we'd died in a crash that night we might not even have made the last paragraph of the obit.

Late-Breaking Pre-Primary Non-News (With Hyphens!)

Non-news from nowhere, and points in between:

We recently went on at length regarding the re-rematch between state Rep. Al Edwards and challenger Borris Miles and noted that should we shrug our spindly shoulders and participate in the Democratic primary––as a nominal Democrat/committed independent it will depend solely on how we feel upon awakening tomorrow, most likely at 5:30 or thereabouts*––we would probably cast our lot with our new Facebook pal, Rep.-for-Life Edwards. Since that writing, we have moved–––or, more passively, been moved––from the “leaning somewhat” to Rep. Al to the “leaning strongly” to Rep. Al column. This oh-so-subtle shift occurred after we realized that almost everybody who’s anybody is against the Rev. Al (or, more positively, for his opponent, Borris the Third Ward Insurance Magnate). And when we say "everybody" we mean everybody from Mayor Annise Parker to the Houston Chronicle editorial board to what appears to be the entire labor-liberal Democratic Party establishment to a veritable host of Borris-believing lions and lionesses of Judah who've lent their names and faces to the pro-Borris propaganda (it's all phony,* BTW, as some Jewish bard from northern Minnesota once sang) that's been cluttering our mailbox (under the apparent and possibly proven assumption that a goodly number of white Democratic primary voters in District 146 are/will be Jews, although an endorsement by the publisher of the Jewish Herald Voice means bupkis to us, and we doubt it means a while lot to the two Jewish households on our block, but whadda we know). Yeah, we're sticking with Rep.-Rev. Al DESPITE the franked mailing we received from his legislative office last week touting a $5.7 million grant to the city from Rick Perry's Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs to help Houston's homeless "transition" to rental housing and "access services designed to enhance self-sufficiency ..." (In fairness to the Rev.-Rep. Al, he has sent us previous mailings from his legislative office, although these were mostly end-of-the-legislative-session wrap-ups that we found generally informative.)

On Sunday we received a warm and engaging personal call from Anthony Hall, the former city councilman, Metro chairman, city attorney and mayoral assistant, on behalf of his daughter, Ursula Hall, who's pursuing the Democratic nomination for a civil-court judgeship in the party primary. Hall's delivery was so slow and precisely enunciated that for a moment we thought he might be live on our telephone machine, but after we interjected an "Anthony?" and a "Hey, Anthony, are you there?" we deduced that the call was recorded, or else Hall has become extremely hard of hearing. In either case, there's nothing like an endorsement from your father to sway voters (and it probably will in the Democratic primary, given the elder Hall's party credentials). Ursula Hall's legal experience––or lack thereof––was the subject of a pretty decent recent offering from the Chronicle's Teen Columnist, who followed up with an equally interesting piece on the primary endorsements of inexperienced district criminal-court contenders by the lordly Coalition of Harris County Elected Democrats (perhaps motherhood has had a maturing effect on the young columnist, although, possibly because the subjects of her explorations were Democrats, she couldn't fully bring the hammer down to squarely nail it, y'understand). We're not wholly convinced that a criminal court judge needs past experience in the criminal courts any more than we believe that a daily newspaper columnist needs past experience as a daily newspaper columnist, but we suppose it couldn't hurt in either profession.

So do we have any predictions on Tuesday's primaries? Nah––all the polls and predictions seem about right to us, most especially this one from Prof 13, aka the Bob Lanier Professor of Public Policy at the University Houston, who based on the early-voting turnout for the GOP primary has the intra-party gubernatorial race a little tighter than other pollster/forecasters/all-knowing seers, with Mofo Perry at 44 percent, K.B. "Maybe You Like Us Both" Hutchison at 37 and D. "I Transcend All Attempts at Semi-Clever Nickname-ry" Medina at 19. On the D side, he guesstimates it as 65 percent for White, 18 for Shami and "others"--there are five such no-names––at 17 percent. Let us be the first, or possibly the 301st, to say that if somehow White gets below 60 percent and/or Shami cracks 25 percent, White loses. (God forbid he's forced into a runoff.) White needs to run up the score, like the Yates High basketball team. We think either of these possibilities is unlikely, but that's why we hold elections (in addition to picking our elected officials, etc.).

*If it's dark, rainy and gloomy outside we may give into our Burkean impulses and vote in the GOP election.
**And we don't mean just the Borris Miles propaganda.

Portrait of Hunger, With Bluetooth

Last week an undersecretary in the Department of Agriculture came to Texas and declared that the state has, according to a report in the Jan. 13 Houston Chronicle, “the worst performing food stamp program in the nation.” What he meant, basically, was that Texas should eliminate its requirements that food-stamp applicants undergo fingerprinting and fill out what the newspaper described as a “time consuming and complicated assets test” so that applications can be processed faster and more people can be eligible for government-subsidized victuals. “If I were a native son sitting down here, I would be very upset that my state was not the leader it is capable of being,” said the undersecretary, who obviously is not a native son sitting down here.

Upon reading this our first thought was, “This undersecretary must be an undercover operative for Rick Perry’s re-election campaign.” Our second thought was, “If I were a Republican, and I’m not, I’d make sure this undersecretary’s statement was stapled to the behinds of Bill White (or, maybe, Farouk Shami) and Ronnie Earle (or, maybe, whoever) to see how far they can run with it.” (By the way, does White have a position on this? We searched high and low on his Web site and even his Facebook page and can find none. Perhaps his position is too, too nuanced and complicated to be explained in a coherent and logical fashion––like Kay Bailey Hutchison’s position on maintaining Roe v. Wade.* Personally, we have no problem with expanding food-stamp availability, temporarily and if necessary, although we see nothing whatsoever wrong with requiring applicants to undergo some semi-foolproof methods of identification confirmation and means-testing.)

Sure as the hack tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley were once moved to reflexively rhyme “moon” with “June” came the Whole Foods shoppers-cum-hunger artists (or artiste), of the Chronicle editorial page, who on Sunday past once again ascended to that Upper West Side of the mind to look down their long, thin noses at Texas and declare “Shame on us: Texas is the worst state in the nation providing food assistance to the hungry.” The hungry? Since when is not being able to immediately acquire food stamps synonymous with “hunger”? (That groaning noise was Orwell, rolling over in his grave while trying to light a cigarette.) The editorial predictably called for doing away with the fingerprinting and means-testing procedures, requirements designed to hold down, if not fully eliminate fraud. “To have so many Texans going hungry should be unacceptable in this proud and walthy state of ours,” harrumphed the editorial, which for some reason did not include the usual routine mention of Children at Risk, the Bob Stein of local social-service lobbyist organizations.

But some Chronicle readers reside in the real world, having no doubt stood in line at the grocery check-out behind overweight shoppers who used their Lone Star cards to buy all manner of unhealthy edibles and then whipped out a wad of cash to pay for the beer, cigarettes and lottery tickets. (It happens, although we personally have never seen it at Whole Foods or Central Market). Next to the Sunday editorial the newspaper published a letter from one of those readers, a Sarah Gonzales, who, when it came to insight, logic and pith, had it all over the writer of the editorial:

I would like to suggest that if the Chronicle was attempting to garner sympathy for those who are facing challenges receiving food stamps, perhaps a better picture could have been chosen to accompany the story. Of the three people pictured standing in line to receive food stamps, two of them are wearing Bluetooth devices. If I was having difficulty feeding my family or myself, the latest in cell phone technology would not be a priority for my discretionary income.

We went back to examine the picture Ms. Gonzales cited, and, sure enough, two of the three (that’s 66 percent) visible would-be food-stamp applicants had those noisome little phone devices in their ears. Perhaps Ms. Gonzales was too polite to mention it, but we’re not: None of the three looked to have missed too many meals lately. You could, in fact, politely describe them as overfed.

On the same day the paper ran its editorial its front page carried a striking Associated Press picture from Haiti that illustrated what real hunger looks like. It did not look like fat people standing leisurely in line while chatting on their Bluetooths (or Blueteeth?).

So tell us: Where should the “shame” really lie?

*In the interest of disclosure, we, like Hutchison, favor maintaining Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to an abortion. We also favor maintaining the death penalty. You might say that we are, in the currently degraded political parlance, pro-death.